Intel surprised many industry watchers when it announced Quark at IDF. This tiny x86 chip is reportedly based on an ancient Pentium core and it is said to be 10 times as efficient as an Atom.

Now it has the first subatomic product based on Quark.

The Galileo board is powered by a Quark X1000 SoC clocked at 400MHz. It is compatible with Arduino and Intel says it will help bolster its cooperation with Arduino. Intel plans to donate 50,000 Galileo development boards to 1,000 universities across the world over the next 18 months.

Intel says Galileo is designed to support shields that operate at either 3.3V or 5V. The core operating voltage of Galileo is 3.3V. The SoC is a 400MHz 32-bit Pentium (ISA) compatible part with 16kB of L1 cache and 512kB of on-die embedded SRAM. It has 256MB of DRAM, enabled by the firmware by default and an optional microSD card up to 32GB is supported.

It is the first Arduino board with an mPCIe slot and USB 2.0/microSD support also offers a few interesting possibilities. However, the added features come at a price. At $60 it’s more than twice the price of the Raspberry Pi, which has an ARM chip and sells for about $25.

You can check out all the relevant documentation over at the Intel Makers Community site, here.